Historian Andrew C. Isenberg reveals in Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, the Hollywood Earp is largely a fiction—one created by none other than Earp himself. The lawman played on-screen by Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster is stubbornly duty-bound; in actuality, Earp led a life of impulsive lawbreaking and shifting identities. When he wasn’t wearing a badge, he was variously a thief, a brothel bouncer, a gambler, and a confidence man.

By 1900, Earp’s misdeeds had caught up with him. Stung by the press, Earp set out to rebuild his reputation. He spent his last decades in Los Angeles, where he befriended actors and directors. Having tried and failed over the course of his life to invent a better future for himself, in the end he invented a better past.

Andrew C. Isenberg is the author of Mining California: An Ecological History and The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920, and the editor of The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space. He is a historian at Temple University. In order to have anything signed at a BookPeople event, a copy of the event book must be purchased from BookPeople. If you purchase your book from BookPeople in advance of the event, please save your receipt and present it at the event.